I admit I really challenged myself this past year, first with vocal lessons, and then with tap dancing.  The vocal lessons were the scariest, as one is alone in a small studio with a person who has a Bachelor of Music degree displayed behind them and a piano in front of them.  Gulp.

Tap was only slightly less terrifying because it involved eight of us and the instructor in a large room.  Hence one could bluff the odd move and get away with it, but alone with the music teacher I could not.  At last, by the final lesson, I had the nerve to just sing loudly and forget about the next pigeon waiting on the chair outside the door.

Scary events that occurred in June included using my GPS to get from Maple Ridge to North Vancouver, and getting to my destination just by luck as half the time it wouldn’t speak at all, and I’d be screaming at it, where to, you bitch.

The same thing returning to my brother’s in Maple Ridge as for fun, while approaching the Port Mann Bridge it was completely silent and I had to use my wits and take the exit for Maple Ridge despite not a whisper.  My God, that is one useless device.

To continue with some adrenaline-inducing fun, I offered to make the food for my friend Beverly’s daughter’s wedding.  There were 45 invited guests and I made sriracha chicken skewers, cocktail meatballs and deviled eggs.  So not all the food that was there, but a good portion of it.

Because I hadn’t found that too difficult, I told mom I wanted to make the dinner for the 20 guests she invited for my 65^th birthday party at her house.  For that I made the same sriracha chicken skewers, pork tenderloin marinated in soy sauce, garlic, oil and mustard, and salmon baked with brown sugar and butter.

I also made an Amish pasta salad which contains hard boiled eggs, a Greek Salad and those little red potatoes baked in oil and honey mustard in the oven.  People went berserk over those.

I bought raspberries and made a puree, then used that to make raspberry buttercream for the chocolate and vanilla cupcakes I’d baked.  I stuck a few candles in those and asked my pals Mary and Phyllis to surprise me by carrying them out, singing, which they did.

I believe all those challenges are now behind me, as the rest of the summer I plan to do nothing but hang around in the garden, admiring the dahlias and marveling at their immense size.  They’re a satisfying thing to plant.

As compared to the peppers I planted in the vegetable garden which are the exact same size they were when planted in May.  The radishes turned into tall green blooming plants and the spinach bolted from the heat.

Hence vegetable gardening remains a mystery and a trial, so I suppose while still alive, one can never fully escape scary challenges.